Native Hex Client for Linux - Test Build

Some of you may or may not be aware that I've never actually run Hex on Windows or OSX. Up until the Dead of Winter patch I had been running the Windows version of Hex under Linux using Wine. The dead of winter patch however introduced a few changes that broke Hex's compatibility with Wine.

Some of you may also know that the Unity engine that Hex runs on supports Linux natively. One of the wonderful people at Hex took a small bit of time to throw all the switches in Unity to "Linux" and spit out some binaries for us which I've been given permission to share today.

Please note this is an unsupported testing build of Hex for Linux. You should not create official support tickets for issues you have with this build and you are using it at your own risk. Myself and / or Hex Ent are in no way responsible if Candlekin escape from the binaries and set fire your package manager.

With that little bit out of the way - you can download the native Linux version of Hex from here.

After the hex.tar.gz downloads, extract the file to your folder of choice and make the contents readable / executable. You can do this from the command line by navigating to the directory you extracted the files in and running the command:

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chmod -R 755 .

You can then launch the native build of Hex by executing the Hex.x86 file in this directory. If you would like to add a Hex menu entry to launch from the GUI you can create a .desktop file and put it somewhere your system can find it (such as ~/.local/share/applications). For example the desktop file I used looks like:

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[Desktop Entry]

Hidden=false

Exec=/home/jeff/Hex_Linux/Hex.x86

Icon=logo-hex.png

Type=Application

Categories=Games;

NoDisplay=false

StartupNotify=true

Comment=Hex Shards of Fate

Terminal=false

Name=Hex Shards of Fate

Display All

I've streamed from this client without major issues for 5~ hours so far having played ladder matches and using the collection manager. The known issues I am aware of so far are:

The client does not accept mouse input when started in fullscreen mode. Fullscreen mode works when switched into from Windowed mode mid-session

The hex startup video does not display when you first launch the application (press escape to skip past the AVPro splash)

Client side API is non-functional

Your client should start windowed mode by default, but if for some reason you switched to full screen you can toggle it back off by, force closing Hex and then opening the file ~/.config/unity3d/HEX Entertainment/Hex/prefs and find the line:

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<pref name="Screenmanager Is Fullscreen mode" type="int">1</pref>

Change the 1 to a 0, save the file, and relaunch Hex.

If you hit any other issues please post them in this thread so we can keep track of them. There might be some platform specific bits hiding in places that Unity did not convert correctly.

is that the way to an official client? or rather a niche, that we will get here and there?

Unsure. Probably depends on the amount of effort required to fix any issues found. As always Hex has limited resources and needs to use them wisely. From my understanding what I've shared in this post was just flipping the "Linux switch" so to speak in Unity and then tarring up what it spit out.

I'm just happy to have something functional that didn't require me to setup Windows on my streaming system.

This would have been really handy a few months ago when I was stuck on Linux for a period of time and the emulators I was using weren't playing nicely with my graphics card, glad to see we've got some traction on this, even if it's in an unofficial testing form.

Thanks a lot @JeffHoogland and @Chris for this. It would be awesome if it meant there's native Linux support in Hex' future.

One thing I noticed so far is that the client API seems to be completely disabled on that version. This turns off a lot of third-party features unfortunately. Maybe it is something that was turned off while building the PS4 client and that Chris forgot to turn back on for this unofficial build, but it would be very nice to have.

I found a bug. This might be a problem in all clients, but whenever I say no to the sacrifice gem's prompt, the game locks up on me. I haven't tried with other prompts, but I know saying yes works.

Once locked, resetting does not fix it, regardless of what I do.

This isn't related to the client, it's actually a rules bug. It's being fixed as we speak. We've already deployed ther fix, it's just filtering through the game servers. Should be totally gone by like 9pm.

Thanks to everyone involved in getting this out. Will be trying it out in a bit.

I'll add my vote to hopefully looking forward to native Linux support in the future. I do IT support for small business clients, which necessitates having easy access to windows, so i tend to keep a Windows use/gaming rig, just makes life easier, but for my purely personal use machines I much prefer Linux, so native support everywhere I want to play would be awesome.

For example, I played a bit this morning, got crushed in draft if anyone cares. Since then I've been in my 'shop' working on setting up a clients network. The only personal machine I have here is my work bench, running Linux, (just better for disk management, etc, that i need here). With a native client, I'd likely be doing the occaisional evo or constructed match while waiting for images to complete, software to load, downloads, etc. as it is I've been off Hex for quite a few hours now.

I'm running a system with a Nvidia card, 384 drivers, 1 monitor. The mouse controls work if I enable fullscreen in the middle of a session. However, I lose mouse functionality if I keep fullscreen on and then restart the client.

I'm running a system with a Nvidia card, 384 drivers, 1 monitor. The mouse controls work if I enable fullscreen in the middle of a session. However, I lose mouse functionality if I keep fullscreen on and then restart the client.

Just to make the bug more interesting

Good catch! On my intel system where I thought it was working it is indeed not when the client is started in fullscreen mode from the start.

I can also confirm, windowed works great. Swapping to fullscreen works for that session, start in full screen, no mouse support. Force back to windowed, via config file, and all is good again. Hopefully this gets some official support.

Issues I've noticed:
1. AVPRO splash screen instead of playing intro movies.
2. Resolution menu runs off the bottom of the screen and there's no way to scroll down further until you change the resolution multiple times so that you can get to the higher resolutions.
3. Looks like there is the well-known Unity3D full-screen clicking bug. This is solved by patching or upgrading, the thread about it is here: forum.unity.com/threads/ui-not…se-events-5-6-0f1.464107/

I'm a few quests into it now and everything else is working great so far!

There is an updated Linux build at the same download URL that resolves the client side API not working. Just place your api.ini file with whatever hooks you want in the same directory as the Hex.x86 file and it should work as expected.